But I carefully didn't equate them.  I made a point of saying "some political movements which have had a strong Christian element in their inspiration".

I completely fail to see how it is illogical to bring politics into religion.  Jesus of Nazareth seems to have done so (to quote a passage I chose for a carol service I was helping arrange.)

"When Jesus came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him.  He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour."  Luke 4.16

Thank you, martle, for the comments of Beethoven 9, which I have tended to take for granted of late.

Almost all representations of Turkish music in late 18th/early 19th century music was understood at the time in terms of political meanings, in terms of representation of the supposedly barbaric, licentious East, with memories of the Battle of Vienna of 1683, and the more recent Russo-Turkish War of 1768-74. Beethoven's particular employment of this musical trope (which he had used elsewhere, for example in the Rondo Capriccio (Rage over a Lost Penny) in the Ninth Symphony, seems more inclusive rather than 'othering', as was the case with many earlier examples of the alla turca style, including Mozart's. Countless amounts of writing from the time show what 'Turkey' represented to Central European audiences.

One thing that's unprecedented and "revolutionary" in Beethoven's music (and here I would count the 3rd and 5th symphonies as much as the 9th, and other pieces too) is a new attitude towards the structure of instrumental music which is characterised by the musical material itself being in a state of conflict or struggle, leading towards resolution and triumph. Before the French revolution (and before it became possible for a composer to live without being the servant of a prince or bishop, which happened in the same general period, not by coincidence) such musical forms were in a real sense "unthinkable". Therefore the social upheavals (and therefore the politics) of Beethoven's time did, I think, have a direct impact on the was the music is structured, and in doing so expanded the scope and depth of symphonic form.

Hm.

What I was saying wasn't intended to imply that the "triumph" need be unalloyed (the incompleteness of it is if anything a further token of those times of upheaval and uncertainty).

We do not blame the Member for this example of the New Barbarism; we expect he was hastily pasting. It is really only the homo-sexualists who can be expected to be meticulous in matters like these is it not?


  Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen?
  Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?
  Such' ihn über'm Sternenzelt!
  Über Sternen muß er wohnen.

It is the audition of his setting of these lines forward to which we look most eagerly whenever we listen to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. On the political level it tells us that its composer was as indeed we all should be a firm champion of the dismantling of "nation states" and the introduction of World Government. This is political with a vengeance; it recommends that the political as it has been hitherto known should finally self-destruct - turn upon and consume itself - leaving a mere residue of "who knows what?"

On the literary level it has the quality of the best British writers of Science Fiction, such as Shiel Wells and so on.

But it is upon the spiritual level that everything comes together in a most marvellous mysticism. We cannot get enough of those new spheres can we and it reminds us of the composer Ruggles' repeating to himself a single chord for hours on end. (We have always maintained that the principle of harmonic - as opposed to contrapuntal - beauty is to be sought in a chord in entire isolation rather than in chords in conjoined succession.) It should be noted too that at the equivalent point - towards the end that is - of his Third symphony Beethoven inserts a really very similar mystical passage and probably even then in 1804 he was thinking along the same lines. What a mind the man had - and what a nuisance his impetuous young nephew must have been!

I too will stick to ß like the FAZ, at least until threatened with jail time.

The Eszett Enforcement Division are on their way.